She opened a new window and set both feeds running simultaneously. “The accomplice heads for gate twenty-four and sits there until—watch the time sequencing—about a minute before our target vanishes, then the accomplice flips on the light. The coordination is so on cue, it’s impossible for it to be coincidental. I keep asking myself how they did it. How do you get that level of precision without communication? And that’s not even the point. The point was misdirection, right? Misdirection for the cameras, Nick. To do this, they knew they were under . . . they were under, were under sur-surveillance before we left Dallas. This isn’t some, some, something you plan and coordinate from twenty-eight thousand feet. And that’s not even, not even, that’s . . . Look, that’s only half, be-because the real point . . .”

She stopped. There were too many threads.

She could see them as a matrix in her head, understood the way they intersected, but her words were choking from the same damn speech disfluencies that always rose when she got animated or agitated, the ones that had made it nigh impossible to communicate complex concepts for the first half of her life and left silence as her safest option, which had only reinforced the accepted belief that the poorest kid in a poor rural school really was a fucking moron. Panic screeched inside her head, wings beating in a wild attempt to escape pain and shame and humiliation.

Nick waited, patient, nonjudgmental, understanding.

He said, “Hey. It’s okay. This is me you’re talking to, right?”

She took a long, deep breath to calm the mental chaos, forced herself to think through to the end, and came back with what she’d been aiming to communicate from the beginning. “The misdirection wasn’t for us on the ground,” she said. “Angel caught that eventually, but right there in that realization, she had to have also realized that for misdirection to work, there needed to be a second person. You see it. I see it. She had to have seen it. She knew before we did, but never told us.” Kara waited and then continued. “If we’d known, Nick, if we’d known from the beginning that there were two of them, if we’d known what we were looking for, we’d have been able to get ahead of them.”

Nick didn’t engage the accusation. He said, “All right, so our new baseline is target plus accomplice. What do you have on accomplice?”